Dean Baker

An AP story in the Washington Post on the IMF’s warnings about debt levels told readers that: “Japan’s debt is proportionately even bigger — about twice its GDP — but the impact is cushioned because most is held by Japanese households.” Actually the fact that the debt is mostly held by Japanese households by itself […]

A Morning Edition piece on the shortfall in Pennsylvania’s public employee pension funds told listeners that just 10 years the funds were over-funded, then the good times went away. Actually, 10 years ago the stock market was in the middle of a huge bubble. This temporarily inflated the assets of pension funds, including the public […]

The NYT article on the passage of the health care reform package noted that the pharmaceutical industry had agreed to reduce their charges by $85 billion over the next decade. It would have been helpful to tell readers that this is a bit more than 2 percent of projected revenues over this period for the […]

It seems that they don’t. The paper has a good article in the business section discussing how drug companies use illegal or unethical methods to push their drugs in order to take advantage of the huge patent rents available. However, the lengthy article never once notes that the patent system is at the heart of […]

The NYT reported that in a speech before the Independent Community Bankers of America Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke lashed out against the risks created by giant too big to fail banks. It would have been worth mentioning that Bernanke had helped to engineer several mergers that made very large banks even larger during […]

According to USA Today, China’s government tried to put a “human face” on its opposition to raising the value of the yuan by presenting the case of a small business owner who is worried that he will lose his workers to better paying employers if the yuan rises in value. Of course, this is not […]

That’s what the Post told readers in noting opposition to Senator Dodd’s bill. Of course just because they say that they are worried about their ability to provide cheap credit to consumers does not mean that this is actually their concern. Lobbyists sometimes do not tell the truth. –Dean Baker

Alan Greenspan refused to acknowledge responsibility for the housing bubble again in a talk given at Brookings yesterday. It would have been helpful if the NYT had provided some additional history to point out to readers that what Greenspan was claiming was not true. For example, Greenspan asserted that: “Unless there is a societal choice […]

AP broke the big news — better be sitting down: “During the 2003-06 boom, the three agencies that supervise most U.S. banks – the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency – gave out at least $19 million in bonuses” Oh my god! oh […]

The Post discussed the extent to which banks have repaid their TARP money, noting that small banks have been much slower to pay back the government loans than large banks. At one point the article discusses the sale of warrants on bank stock that the government received as part of the package. It comments that: […]